Archives for February 2021

I’m excited to talk about the Space Development Agency and what we have done over the past year and our year term and long term visions. I want to talk about the many products that we’re developing and delivering, so SDA is set up to exist and operate almost as a commercial entity within the Defense Department and, as such, we are very focused on product delivery. Those products are capabilities that we are giving to the warfighter.

The two products were are primarily focused on are, #1, Beyond-Line-Of-Sight (BLOS) targeting for time-sensitive targets, or mobile targets … think mobile missile launchers or ships and being able to detect them, identify them, calculate a firing control solution on those targets, and then provide those data directly to a weapons system and do all that from space.

Product #2 is to be able to do that exact same mission as Product #1 except now, instead of mobile missiles and ships, I want to be able to do that for advanced missiles, so hypersonic glide vehicles and those types of things. Detect them, track them, calculate a fire control solution and give it to the warfighters. Those are the products that the SDA is focused on delivering for the warfighter in the future.

Now one question — why do we need the SDA to do this, I mean, we’ve got the Space Force, we’ve got a lot of different entities and most of you have already talked about this, so I’ll only touch on it briefly, but all boils down to the innovator’s dilemma. The same thing that affects industry affects government, as well. That is, when you have the large entity that is entrenched with delivering to an existing, entrenched customer, they are primarily focused on delivering those capabilities in a low list, incremental approach. And that’s nothing wrong with the large entity, whether that be a large corporation that’s been building a product, or rather that be an organization within the government that is delivering certain products.

But the key thing to realize is, the innovator dilemma is real. The innovator’s dilemma simply states that you cannot focus on innovation at the same time you’re focusing on delivering a product to an existing customer. What enables innovation is the ability for to go out and look at products that affect a lot of new customers, new bases, and you can have a small win and it’s a big deal for you. For a startup corporation, for a startup company or a startup entity within the government, a small win is a big deal. For a larger entity, it’s not, so you’re going to be focused on low risk, incremental approaches.

The SDA is focused on going out there, and going out there a broad set of customers, our customers are all combatant commanders that the department feels can execute the mission, make sure we can provide those capabilities, those products that I previously mentioned. In order to do that, we’re taking a completely different approach. The approach we’re taking is to stop focusing on high value, low density, capabilities by high value, low density satellites and focus on high density, low value satellites, or focus on proliferation. So that’s scenario #1. We’re going to provide those products via proliferation. Hundreds to thousands of satellites that provides us with the resilience needed and it also provides us with the timely access needed to deliver those products.

Scenario #2 is spiral development. One of the key things that is different are going to field the capabilities… we’re going to field those products every two years. And each tranche presents new capabilities that incrementally improve over the previous set. And we’re going to continue to build these up, as threats evolve and as technology evolves.

We want to make sure we take technology that is ready to field today and get that to orbit within two years to provide those new capabilities to the warfighter. That is different than looking at what is the ultimate set of requirements that we need to deliver and then develop a program to build and deliver that set of capabilities and that could require cost growth, it could require schedule growth, all to make sure you hit that given set of requirements. We’re not basing off that… we have spiral development. We’re going to field new tranches every two years and just continue to spiral up those capabilities.

How are we going to provide those next two products? We have what is known as the National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA). That is our layered approach to delivering those capabilities.

The icon on the right are the actual set of systems — this is a functional block diagram that talks about how we are going to deliver those capabilities. The backbone is the transport… that’s that blue gray box in the middle. That is the mesh network of hundreds of satellites, all optically interconnected, that provides a low latency data comm network and also provides connectivity directly down to existing, tactical beta links. We’re not fielding new equipment to the user on the ground. We’re going over their existing tactical beta links from that transport layer.

OK, so that’s great. That’s the backbone, that’s how we tie everything together to make sure I can have high bandwidth, low latency communications directly to the end-user on the ground. What really makes this powerful is now I can put data onto that network that the user needs. So the three sensing layers off to the right, those are the ones that provide the data to that transport layer.

Number One is Tracking. That is our overhead, persistent infrared tech, those are the satellites that provide the detection and tracking for the advanced missile threat. SDA is building those out with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to make certain we can field that constellation.

Number Two is Custody. Think of target custody. That is our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) — that is the layer that provides the ability to detect and track those mobile targets that I mentioned previously. That is a set of constellation of electro-optical, a set of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), that can be a set of SIGNIT satellites. All of those data feed into what we call the Custody layer. And this is a mixer of commercial applications and commercial constellations as well as government owned and operated constellations. When we’re working with industries to make sure we can get commercial data from their commercial imagery satellites onto what we call our Custody layer, we can fuse all of those data together.

And the Deterrence is the third one, that is our Space Situational Awareness (SSA) layer. And right now we’re not doing a lot with that because the Space Force is actually focused a lot on that area to focus on how they can improve that resiliency and those detection capabilities. Primarily, we looking at cisLunar space, but AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) has some programs in that, so, we’re just watching that as part of our Deterrence layer.

The key things is to get all of those data, get it to the Transport layer, so it can be fused and further disseminated out to the tactical edge, out to the warfighter. Now a lot of that essentially takes some magic, right? That’s what the Battle Management light blue layer is. All of this onboard processing, all of the real-time algorithms that enable this data fusion, automatic target recognition, and network management, all of that is what we call our Battle Management layer. And that is a federated layer that runs on all of the satellites, but primarily the Transport satellites, so that we can do federated processing or cloud processing across all of those satellites to enable the ability to do this computation in real-time.

One other layer is our Navigation layer. Now, Navigation is essentially for free from Transport. If I have that Transport architecture that has all of these optical crosslinks and exquisite timing between the satellites, I can get very precise time and position of the satellite. Then, I can send that data down as a Navigation message over those existing Tactical beta links. In essence, people can get a Navigation timing message over their existing comm links from the Transport satellite.

That’s what we’re doing for alternative navigation. And then of course there’s the Support layer — that is our ground support equipment — that is our launch and operations — and any special user that we would field — right now, we don’t anticipate any. That would all be handled by the support layer. That is the ‘how’ we are going to provide those capabilities.

Now, when would we actually field these capabilities. As I mentioned, we’re developing these in tranches. The first set right now, basically last year and this year, we’re building up some technology developments, primarily working with DARPA and AFRL. Space Development Agency does not want to focus on tech development … we want to focus on capability and product field.

We’re going to fly a few demos in 2021, but primarily it’s all to show those capabilities that we can go from space over existing tactical data links so that we can show we can use commoditized optical crosslinks to talk to one another, talk to the ground, and also talk to airborne platforms.

The real capabilities start happening we seal our Tranches. Tranche 0 in FY22, so we’re looking at our first launch in September of 2022, second launch in March of 2023. We want to field 30 satellites total in this Tranche. Twenty of those satellites are Transport satellites. That will show that we can seal this mesh network to show that we can do this computation, we can do the optical networking and that we can actually communicate to the ground and airborne assets. We’ll demonstrate all of that in Tranche 0. We’ll also demonstrate a set of wide field and medium field of view satellites to do the missile tracking mission to show we can network those with Transport, we can actually calculate fire control solutions based on the data.

All of that makes up the Tranche 0 constellation. Then we’re working with mission partners to show we can take Custody, ISR data from their satellites via the ground back to Transport to the tactical edge. And for Navigation, we’ll also show that we can, in essence, do timing transfer and calculate the position of those satellites. We call Tranche 0 our Warfighter Emerging Tranche because it allows people to start to develop their comm ops and their techniques and procedures to work with these kind of data.

Tranche 1 two years later, now we have hundreds of satellites in the Transport layer. We can actually start to get regional persistence for that tactical comm layer and we’ll move that data in and out of theater. For Tracking, right now we’re working within the department to say exactly what would be funded as part of Tranche 1 for Tracking, but ideally, we would have on the order of 47 satellites that would give us enough capabilities for regional persistence to be able to detect advanced missile threats. For Custody, we’re working with mission partners to field out their constellations and get their constellations to plug into Transport to move those data. Some of those mission partners are commercial ISR providers.

Tranche 0 is our immersion Tranche and is essentially the free product, if you will, that will get people hooked on what we’re selling. It will allow them to see the data, understand what proliferated LEO can provide for their situation and then allow them to start to develop their plans around access to those data.

In Tranche 1, that’s when we have initial warfighting capability. This is our Release 1, if you will. This is when we have enough satellites up there so we can actually start to provide persistence over a given region of interest. We can actually start to affect a fight in different regions.

Tranche 2, hundreds more satellites, and now we have global persistence, not just regional persistence. That’s our final operating capability. In Tranche 3, that’s when we start to fold in lessons learned from Tranche 1. We start to pull in new technology that was developed along the way and then we can start to respond to new Tranches as they come online.

Tranche 4 and beyond, every two years, new technology gets fielded, more satellites get fielded, and we adjust based on threat and need. So, that’s how we operate.

How are we doing this execution-wise? One of the key things that we’ve learned over the year is that you can do quite well with distributed operations.

These are all of the locations where SDA has individuals that are working and operating, helping us to make this happen, so we’re distributed. Our next facility is going to open up some ground and mission operations center at in North Dakota. We have distributed operations to make sure we have access to talent where we need to and we can get to those missions in those locations.

The graphic above shows how busy we’ve been in the last year. It seems like not that long ago, when I was in person at the last smallsat conference talking about our plans for 2020, and I just want to highlight that we have been successful in hitting all of the milestones and achieving what we expected to achieve in 2020, even despite all of the challenges with COVID.

These are the contracting actions that we’ve taken over the last year to make sure that we have all of the pieces moving and actually pushing forward delivering these products. Primarily the key thing is that we’ve executed 11 contracts in 2020 — we received our first funding early in February of 2020 and since then we’ve been able to execute.

The key contracts that are critical to that Tranche 0 success. For Transport, we have 20 satellites, 10 on contract from Lockheed Martin and YORK Space Systems. Ground, Naval Research Laboratory is helping us with Ground. Missions Systems Engineering & Integration is done by Perspecta. They’re helping to make sure all of these pieces and parts come together, as we have multiple performers with multiple pieces. Launch was the most recent contract awarded to SpaceX for two launches, one in September of 2022 and the second one no later than March of 2023. And Tracking, we have two performers there, each delivering four satellites — L3Harris and SpaceX. As part of our mission team, MDA has two satellites and they have L3Harris and Northrop Grumman on their team.

All of these performers are the ones actually doing the work. At the SDA, we’re in the government, we don’t actually do anything, we try to enable the folks that are actually doing the work. This is our Tranche 0 team and they’re actually building the satellites and making it happen.

The SDA accomplishments — we did deliver two satellites, nine months after receiving our initial funding. Those two satellites are at the bottom of this graphic. This was our holiday card — this was a joint mission between DARPA, AFRL and SDA to build these two satellites.

Unfortunately, there was a mishap during payload processing down at the Cape, so they were not two of the 143 satellites that were launched as part of the SpaceX Transporter 1 mission. But, the good news is, while they were damaged in payload processing, we will be able to repair them and we will be able to launch them on Transporter-2.

We’ve awarded all of the contracts for all of the performers to build out Tranche 0 and we are now started to being recognized within the Pentagon and within the department as really a change agent. People are seeing what we are doing and that’s good.

Now let’s talk about some about some of the big impacts we’ve had. I cannot overstate the profundity of the proliferation and final development of architecture. When this was first pitched, this whole concept, within the Pentagon, within the department, people looked at the capabilities that we were planning to be able to provide and they said, “Who are those satellites to be able to do that?” With that, we looked at their historical model. This chart reveals the hundreds of millions of dollars per satellite. So, if you want to proliferate hundreds to thousands of these satellites, there’s no way that’s affordable. I contended at the time that, no, the price was going to be actually less than $20 million per satellite and, in fact, it was affordable and I was basing that off what I had seen in industry to that point and what the commercial providers were able to do.

As it turns out, you look at our Transport satellite, those 20 satellites — if you take the average cost of all the NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering costs) on those 20 satellites — it averages out to $14.1 million. It really shows that, yes, in fact, this is believable and it can be done at an affordable cost. And as we push forward on cost one, the key thing there is now we’re talking about on the order of 150 satellites. So, we even need to push that down lower. I believe this is feasible, because we got a lot of responses back to our request for information (RFI) from industry saying, you know, if you’re buying into scale, we can push it down significantly lower than the cost in the current contracts. We’re excited about that. And that really shows the power of proliferation and how we can be resilient against the threats and provide these capabilities in a timely manner.

This is what enabled the revolution for this kind of concept. And it’s not anything the government has done, it really what’s been driven by commercial enterprises, commercial innovation and commercial industry pushing the price down, only in the cost of these satellites, but the cost of launches has dropped significantly as well. That is what is enabling these missions to succeed and that is key. I need industry to partner with me on that, to continue to come up with ways on how to drive that down, how to drive manufacturability up so we can continue to push proliferation and final development.

Some of the details as to how we are marching forward for our product release are shown in the chart above. Tranche 0. As I mentioned, we have a few demos planned in 2021, so I’ll talk a little about those. Obviously, Blackjack at the top, that’s a DARPA demo and they’ve got several different concepts. They’re going to fly two satellites later this year and then they’re going to culminate with more than that, somewhere on the order of a dozen up to 18 satellites in the 2022-2023 timeframe as the full DARPA Blackjack program.

PIRPL is a joint SDA – MDA program. The performer is Northrop Grumman and that is to fly a medium field of view, multi-spectral imager for OPIR (Overhead Persistent Infrared) to be able to demonstrate feasibility and use that for some of our models. That will be launched on Engine 16 later this year.

Mandrake II as I mentioned would be on-orbit but, unfortunately, it will now be launched on Transporter-2 in June, so we’re looking forward to that. That will demonstrate optical crosslinks between two satellites, optical crosslink to the ground, and optical crosslink to airborne systems. We’re excited about that.

LINCS, that is a meta-optical crosslinks demonstration. That is General Atomics, they are the performer on that. Again, that’s two satellites demonstrating that we can do optical crosslinks with various, other entities. That will also be launched on Transporter-2.

XVI, that is primarily an AFRL program that we are working with AFRL on because we are definitely a transition partner. That would demonstrate that you can go from space to a Link 16 tactical datalink network. That will be launched later this year.

And, of course, SMC (Space & Missile Systems Center) and DARPA are working a lot of ground operations. MDA is working a lot of ground operations and we’re tracking and working with them on that.

The key thing then is in 2022, that’s when we launch our Tranche 0. That’s 20 Transport satellites, eight wide field of view OPIR satellites and two medium field of view HBTSS (Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor) satellites being built and delivered by MDA.

Then Tranche 1 comes up in 2024 where we have on the order of 150 Transport satellites and, hopefully, depending on what happens within the funding debate in the department, on the order of 40 Tracking satellites.

Longer term plans and what can really be expected… we’re on track to Tranche 0, so that’s pushing forward. All we can do is hope for success there and continue to deliver and make sure we hit those milestones. Obviously the folks that are on contract are the ones that are responsible for making sure they execute. The key thing going forward is Tranche 1. Tranche 1 is going to be a big deal. One hundred and fifty-ish satellites for Transport. Pushing forward, the plan is to issue an RFP (Request for Proposal) this summer for that. We want to get those on contract by the end of this calendar year so that we can build and have all 150 satellites ready for launch for that September 2024 date. That’s what we’re pushing for.

We already have our Request for Information (RFI). We’ve received feedback from industry. We understand that and we’re pulling that in. We plan on coming out with a draft RFP in the summer. Shortly thereafter, after we get feedback from industry, we’ll come out with the real RFP and hope to continue to push forward. That’s what you should be watching for.

Let’s talk about the grand vision overview of what capabilities and product we plan on fielding in the future. We view this as our product roadmap. For Tranche 0 has gone into the detail box, what capabilities will be included in that product. Tranche 1, a little about the details there as far as what capabilities we provide to include in that product as a minimal, viable product. But then, for Tranches 2 , 3, 4 and 5 on out, this is the product roadmap. If folks are looking at what we should be investing in, in industry, to make sure that we can come up with a product that we can sell to the Space Development Agency that they will include in their Tranches that is necessary for the warfighter, this is essentially the product roadmap that you could use for investment.

We need a lot of autonomy and real-time processing. That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal not only on the on-board processing, but add hard board processing, you’ll see a lot of that is included in the green lines here. That’s Battle Management. There’s a lot of activity in there and we need help with industry. We need a lot of algorithm development work to make sure that we can actually autonomously port so that we can port algorithms developed from the ground so that we can get those to run autonomously in space to be able to do data fusion and automatic target recognition, those kind of things.

On the Transport side, the big key issues there are, how can we be ensure that we can have very small encryption devices that fit in the timescale and the SWaP seed that we need to do this proliferation. That’s a big deal. How can we continue to push differences in our Navigation, so that we can fuse data together, come up with a Nav message and get that off to the field. Those are key areas of investment. And we’ll be continuing to push on the optical crosslinks on that technology. Those are all key things along the Transport capability roadmap.

As far as the Sensing roadmap for Tracking and Custody, primarily there we are looking at are there other missions that folks are fielding — can we use those data to be able to synergistically come up with a solution where we fuse those together. That’s why the areas where we’re looking for investment and for folks to team with us, as well as any kind of autonomy.

This is our product roadmap. Please, take this and study it to see if there are ways you can help. We also have a broad area announcement on the street that kind of talks about investment that we’re willing to make to buy down some of our largest technical risks. If you have concepts there that can buy down those risks, send us an executive summary and we’d love to open up that conversation. With that, we really appreciate your time and the opportunity to talk today about what Space Development Agency has done and our future plans and look forward to continuing to team with industry to make these a reality. Thank you.

Florence Tan is the Chief Technologist (Acting), Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Chair, Small Spacecraft Coordination Group at NASA. She presented the following regarding the work of NASA within the smallsat community…

NASA is doing amazing science with smallsats. First, a little history. We are all aware of the Apollo missions to the moon in 1971. What is not so well known is that the Apollo 15 and 16 missions deployed smallsats at the command module as it left lunar orbit. Here (image below) you can see one of the satellites that flew. It carried three instruments: a magnetometer, a charged particle detector and an S-band transponder. It made a number of important measurements… plasma, particle and magnetic field of the Moon’s environment and mapped the lunar gravity field.

Traditionally, NASA uses legacy-class flight ship missions… think Hubble, Cassini or the Perseverance rover that’s landing in a few days on Mars. We use these missions to achieve our goals of extraordinary science and supporting explorations through innovative technology. There is a place for flight ship missions; however, we recognize the value and impact of smallsats, from cubesats to Esper-class spacecraft. The concepts we are able to use to perform targeted science to prove out new technologies and innovations and train and educate our future workforce.

To this end, NASA stood up the Small Spacecraft Coordination Group (SSCG), whose goal is to improve coordination among our mission directorates, to place more emphasis on the overarching, integrated, smallsat strategy to advance our agency’s objectives.

In August 2019, the SSCG released a NASA Small Spacecraft strategic plan. Our strategies are influenced by NASA’s Achieving Sciences Report Recommendations and adds guidance to those recommendations to account for the future capabilities and growth in launch systems and Esper class spacecraft.

In late 2018, SMD released a policy and established this policy, NASA STD-32. This policy enables rideshare or launch accommodation opportunities using an Esper-class ring as part of the launch service procured for an SMD (Science Mission Directorate) primary payload. In early 2020, during the Access to Space workshop, we announced the establishment of the Rideshare Office, headed by Aly Mendoza-Hill, to maximize science, exploration and technology returns by enabling accommodation opportunities for secondary payloads on SMD primary mission launches.

Shown above is NASA’s smallsat science mission fleet chart. Across the six divisions of SMD, we have funded 72 cubesat and smallsat missions and 57 studies to date. Currently, we have 40 small spacecraft missions, or 63 spacecraft, in implementation or formulation. The funding for smallsat missions and studies over 11 years is greater than $2 billion. Two-thirds of our missions are 6U or larger. We are shifting toward constellations, as well.

The next two charts are going to be a synopsis of some of our science missions. As our Associate Administrator for Science said, “These missions do big science but they are special because they come in small packages, which means you can launch them together and get more research for the price of a single launch.”

TROPICS, CYGNSS and PREFIRE are EO missions. CYGNSS is a cyclone, global navigation satellite system. It was launched in December of 2016 and is comprised of eight smallsats. CYGNSS measures the strength of GPS signals reflected by the Earth’s surface to divide the properties of the surface. In its four years of operation, CYGNSS has been able to make measurements of global oceans, surface winds such as tropical cyclones to help understand meteorological processes and improve numerical weather forecasts. Over land, CYGNSS has made measurements of flood inundation. CYGNSS also produces daily soil moisture data products and these are used in hydrological process studies and for disaster monitoring. Recently, CYGNSS was approved for another three years of operation.

TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats). TROPICS is a constellation of six, 3U cubesats in three orbital planes and carries scanning microwave radiometers to measure temperature, humidity, precipitation and cloud properties and offers a combination of horizontal and temporal resolutions to measure the violent conditions and inner core conditions of tropical cyclones at a near global scale. This is a profound leap forward for detailed studies of high impact meteorological events.

Next is PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment). This experiment offers a new window to polar observation and polar climate predictions. It’s going to fly two, 6U cubesats and will systematically map the Earth’s far-infrared emissions spectrum in polar or near-polar orbit for the first time. Thanks to the investments we’ve made to ambient temperature detection and miniaturized optics, we are able to fly the thermal infrared spectrometer that weighs less than 3 kg, uses less than 5 watts of power and sits within a 3U form factor. PREFIRE will fly in two, distinct orbits, separated by a few hours, and able to quantify with spectral fingerprints of atmospheric and surface cloud and ice melt. We can use these observations to integrate them with models so that we are able to ensure these measurements toward the improvement in polar climate predictions.

NASA recently announced three, exciting, selections of smallsat missions for further concept studies. Pandora is a mission to study the atmosphere features of exoplanets in our solar neighborhood. StarBurst seeks to understand the nature of neutron star mergers with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is a facility dedicated to the detection of cosmic gravitational waves and the measurement of these waves for scientific research. It consists of two widely separated installations within the United States, operated in unison as a single observatory. And Aspera is a small telescope that will map the gas of galaxies near our own Milky Way so that we can understand the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. Everyone of these missions will be addressing compelling astrophysics.

Around planetary science, we just launched last month a Q-PACE (CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment) mission. We will be introducing particles in the low gravity of LEO to understand and look at the formation process of our own solar system and the genesis of planetary ring systems.

Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, called LunaH-Map, is an exciting instrument that will launch on the Artemis I mission (September 2021) and will feature a miniaturized neutron spectrometer that will study and map hydrogen abundance within the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole. These PSRs may contain enough water to change our view of the formation and evolution of the Moon or may contain enough water to support human and robotic exploration of the solar system.

Then we have the SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission, which will study the sun’s coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs can accelerate particles that produce radio emissions and we’re interested in how solar particles are accelerated and released into interplanetary space and we are very interested in this from the fundamental point of view as well as the effect on space and on Earth and our space assets. SunRISE is a combination of new 6U cubesats operating as a radio interferometer to produce an aperture with a diameter of around 10 km. The idea is to take a picture of the CME that is erupting and we know where the space stuff is because the smallsats also pickup the GPS signals. We take the data and collect it and transmit it down to the ground for processing so we can see a picture of where these particles are accelerated.

Today, NASA is leveraging the capabilities of the commercial space industry for science and smallsats. NASA has a wider diversity of options for access to space. We have new capabilities that play an important role for launching large numbers of sallsats, including constellations, as well as global telecom and data services, buses for smallsats, and NASA has a contract for commercial data buys as well as rideshares to GEO. We are working with NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation group to provide comm requirements for our Near Earth Orbit assets in order to transition to one hundred percent commercial telecom service in the years to come.

The future is bright. We see a shift toward small, mini-sats for sustained, decadal-class observations. For this, there is a need for miniaturization of instrumentation, materials and hardware that can withstand environmental space, data assimilation and simulation tools. As our sensors mature, the data products from large and small missions will become indistinguishable. We will gain new insights from multi-instrument constellation data fusion and analytics. And we will require the tools to understand the data. We will have cooperative synergies among small and large missions and internal cooperation on key, community, science measurements. Commercial services such as comms, and ground station operations, could be used for our goals.

In turn, we must re-think how we look at reliable cost risks of small spacecraft, especially in constellations. We may not have the same risk requirements profile as with a large, multi-million dollar mission. We can take advantage of affordable and more frequent access to space that allows high replenishment rates of satellite fleets. The last 10 years have seen a flowering of the domestic and international space industry, the commercial utility of LEO in all sectors.

For the more than 30 years I have worked at NASA, I take great pride and delight to see the maturation of the American space sector. It is with great satisfaction that we can leverage the U.S. space industry’s innovative technologies and services for our science missions and take advantage of the kinds of scale offered by industries and tax payer dollars. I thank you for your time.

Chris Stott, Executive Chairman, Mansat, was the moderator of this extremely interesting interview of Sir Richard Branson, the Founder of Virgin Galactic, and Dan Hart, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Orbit, on Day Three of the SmallSat Symposium.

Chris Stott (CS): Gentlemen, you are making the extraordinary look amazing. That launch was superb and that must have been quite a moment, I mean, that was the 17th of January, not quite a month ago, you hit all of the points on the curve. So, how did it go? What’s next for Virgin Orbit?

Dan Hart (DH): It was an incredible day. It was picture perfect. We’ve now gone through the data review with and are still pinching ourselves. The orbit was perfect. Ten satellites in their place. We’re getting videos and pictures from excited students and researchers as they activate their spacecraft. It went better than anybody could have ever dreamed. Every part of the system came together.

Sir Richard Branson (RB): I’ve had quite a few tears in my eyes the last 12 months between Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit. I definitely teared up on this one. The team have worked unbelievably hard the last four years to get to here. What they were trying to achieve was not easy and we we’ll be able to launch on numerous 747s from different parts of the world. We want to be able to build rockets and ship out quickly to different parts of the world. We want them to be able to go in to the right orbit or any orbit anywhere in the world. They ticked all of the boxes and I couldn’t be happier.

CS: So, your timing on this was superb because there’s a lot of tough competition in the launch services industry right now. You’ve had a couple of competitors launch recently. You’ve been at this for a while. So, how do you see yourselves in this competitive environment?

RB: I think we’re operating a different proposition to most of the other people. We can take up more weight than in the size of the satellite and we’re going to be building rockets that are much bigger than the current rocket, as well. They’ll take up even more weight. There is an enormous demand for the kind of project we are doing, i.e., the launch from a 747 anywhere in the world, both from commercial people to put new satellites up. I think what makes us particularly unique is our capability for the U.S. Air Force or the British Air Force, the Canadian Air Force, French Air Force, all of whom have been encouraging and working with us over the last two to three years to give them an extreme deterrent capability so that if they were to lose satellites anywhere in the world, they can be replaced incredibly quickly. If we do this cleverly, what 747 can take those satellites up, they won’t know — we can convert enough 747s and it’s much more difficult for an enemy power to know planes than just one ground based launch which they can take out in a minutes notice. We’ve got quite a range of things that this company is capable of.

DH: If I can pipe in, I just want to shout out to the Virgin Orbit team. This is a team that… I respect any team that can take a rocket and can get to 17,000 mph or more. This is a team that came together and brought a new capability… I mean, this is the first time a liquid rocket flew from an airport under the wing of a 747 or any airplane and ended up in orbit. And so the team really advanced space technology, proved it operational and we have, as Richard said, unique capability, both from an affordability point of view and the economics of getting a rocket into 35,000 feet before it has to do any work and the flexibility, the resilience, and the deterrent that Richard mentioned. And the ability, you know, we have about 80 space agencies around the world — I think the amount of countries that have launched within their sovereign shores right now can probably be counted easily on two hands and so there’s an enormous desire and opportunity to democratize our ability to have humanity get to space.

RB: With COVID, it was not easy — everytime we were about to do something, one member got COVID so everybody had to climb down and then come back again and then somebody else got COVID, but somehow they got there, but it was, like every company in the world, it was a challenge and the team was no exception.

CS: If you can pull this off in regular time, that is extraordinary. To do this in these times of historic moment with COVID is astoundingly good and it speaks volumes to the people you have working with you. You have that ability to not just launch in the United States and I think you’ve got a launch coming up… at some point, you’re going to be the first launch in the United Kingdom. Is that correct?

DH: Yes, that’s exactly right, in Cornwall. We’ve been working with Cornwall for a couple of years now and the project is moving along well and we look forward to next year to doing our first launch at Cornwall Airport Newquay.

RB: Many happy memories of Cornwall, a beautiful part of Britain.

CS: You’ve recently started to expand what Virgin Orbit has been doing. You took a stake in a satellite communications company, Sky & Space Global. Could you please talk us through that?

DH: You know, launch is a cornerstone of, obviously, space access and the whole space ecosystem. Our ability to flex into adjacencies is a natural. Sky & Space Global is an initial step there. We really look forward to working and developing a system and other systems. We see an evolution for the company obviously through launch, through distributed launch, both for the national security community as well as the international community of Allies, and then there are a plethora of space adjacencies, whether its in other aspects of national security, or in the commercial turnkey kinds of systems like Sky & Space Global is going after.

CS: Is it just limited to satellite communications or is it a broader look at anything that goes into orbit with Virgin Orbit?

DH: We have a pretty expansive evolution of the company planned. We’re evaluating right now with this success there’s lots of possibilities and, frankly, we’re getting lots of queries.

RB: I think something I would like to encourage the company to do and is more than welcome to take this onboard is that there will be a lot of people who do approach the company with wonderful ideas to put satellites in space. It’s just that they can’t afford it. What we can also now start doing is helping them get their projects off the ground, maybe take a stake in the company, and get their satellites to orbit. We’re entrepreneurs through and through and that’s the kind of entrepreneurial thing that Virgin Orbit should be doing. If there are people out there that have great ideas, you know, put something in space but they can’t afford to do it, then we could maybe do it in terms of a stake in the company.

CS: Fascinating. I would imagine then that they would have to reach out to Dan?

DH (laughing): I think my phone is starting to ring now!

CS: Don’t put your email up, Sir Richard. What is this group you are building? How do you see all of the space companies working together? And where does space fit into the Virgin brand?

RB: Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit don’t fit together in a sort of too obvious a way, which is why we split the companies into two separate entities, one putting satellites into space and the other putting people into space. But they’re both incredibly important to the Virgin Group. Obviously they came along and saved the Virgin Group. I’m a great believer in diversification, so that, if something like SARS or COVID hits you, or 9-11 or whatever, you’re diversified enough to be able to help the companies that are in trouble and when COVID hit, we launched our Cruise line the day before COVID hit — that wasn’t a great idea — we had two airlines — that wasn’t a great idea — we had the biggest fitness chain outside America — that wasn’t a good idea — including South Africa — we had hotels around the world — that wasn’t a good idea — and so it goes on. So, the one shining light has been Galactic and Orbit and thank God we did diversify into space. I didn’t diversify into space thinking I am going to make lots of money out of space. I diversified into space because I love space, I love connecting people, I love the idea of giving people the opportunity to become astronauts who could never generally afford to become astronauts, I love creating things. I love my granddaughter who is two looking up at the sky. After Dan’s rocket went into space, and pointing up and saying Pappa’s rocket’s on the moon. Pappa’s rocket is on the moon. Anyway, there’s lots of reasons, but if it can help pay the bills to a varying degree, we are very, very grateful to space.

DH: I would also add that from the other side being in a space company that’s part of Richard’s creation of Virgin, there are some special elements — and Richard touched on some of them — you know, this feeling of purpose, that we’re in this to make a difference, and as well as the agility kind of thing that Richard expressed a little while ago for an entrepreneurial company, our sights are set high and we’re agile… it doesn’t take a lot of discussions and meetings when a good idea comes to say let’s go for it. Those are things that I’m continually reminded of through discussions with Sir Richard and the team that he has built at Virgin.

CS: Sir Richard and Dan, you both just talked about the importance of people. I’m an entrepreneur myself — I keep tabs —- and you have some great quotes on people. “Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the flow.” And that’s something we’ve always done at our company, ManSat, and its always because we followed your lead on that. Sir Richard, how do choose your teams? How do you choose your people?

RB: First of all you need somebody like Dan who genuinely cares about people, who cares about the cleaning lady or cleaning man as much as they care about their fellow directors, who look for the best in people, who praises and doesn’t criticize. If somebody messes up, doesn’t jump down their throats. When I was a kid, if I ever said anything ill of somebody, my parents would stand in front of the mirror for ten minutes and tell me how badly it reflected on myself. I think it’s that kind of approach is really important if you are running companies. The kind of people we take on are people who are great with people first and then we look for the other skills. It seems to work well at certain companies.

CS: Dan, you’ve just taken on a whole bunch of new people. You’ve demonstrated your great with people and teams and you can achieve your milestones but you are just taking on so many people, so what do you look for?

DH: Obviously you want to have some good level of skill but the positivity, the feeling of wanting to move forward and work together, is probably the most crucial part of pulling a team together, especially when you’re going to take on a hard job and working together, sometimes in stressful days, and the ability to laugh, the ability to shake off a setback and move forward, it is absolutely critical. And I think our company is a great mix of people who are new to the industry or in their first decade of work and then people who have been around for a few extra years like myself, and combining that and doing it well I think is absolutely key. The next group who are going to take us to planets and to different capabilities around the world are here and it i s really exciting to see them rising and making the system real.

RB: In the process of what you’re doing and there’s no fun in doing something unless people are going to be inspired by it and believe in it. A lot of our lives are spent at work and its critical that you don’t waste your life and say you’ve got to create something with real purpose.

CS: Sir Richard, is space the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

RB: Yes. But then again, if you’d have asked me the same question 36 years ago when we had one, second-hand, 747 flying between London and New York with British Airways with 300 planes I suspect I would have said yes, yes to Virgin Atlantic. We have set ourselves some quite big challenges and that’s made it tremendous fun, trying to overcome those challenges and trying to deal with some much bigger competitors.

CS: Dan, you spent 34 years at Boeing, one of the largest aerospace corporations in human history, and you left and joined a startup?

DH: I started when I was 12 (laughing). It was really a great transition and, honestly, I had a wonderful career with Boeing and McDonnell Douglas that was part of that in the early years. I got to do incredible things there, whether it was space labs or missile defense, or satellites, Delta rockets, but when I got the call, there’s an opportunity to work with Virgin and Sir Richard and do something new for space launch, there was no turning that down. It’s been a great learning experience, honestly, on different ways, different cultures, different ways to operate, the speed of which I learned up front. In my old job, sometimes you would have a number of meetings to make a decision. I think the first time I had a big decision and I asked Richard, he looked at me and said, you’re doing that, aren’t you?

CS: The power of delegation. We’ve got about three minutes and I have three very quick questions. Sir Richard, you look prescient when you did a SPAC… you were the first in the space industry to do a SPAC back in October of 2019. Now everyone’s talking about them. What led you down that path to be the first to go do a SPAC for space?

RB: I’m impatient.The SPAC gets through all of the rigamarole of public companies. Yes, I thought, that’s great, let’s do it.

CS: Well, it worked, that’s great. Gentlemen, last question… before a launch, before something big is about to happen, how do you center yourself? What is your moment of Zen? How do you, kind of, stay focused?

RB: I was lucky enough to have five grandkids running around me so think that kept me distracted, which is what I think I needed. Poor Dan didn’t have that chance. He was out there on the firing line.

DH: Well, I mean, for me there was a schedule of things I needed to do and people I needed to interact with, whether it was with the flight line with the launch team, greeting the flight crew as they came or interacting with the mission control folks, so luckily I had things to do. I will say I’ve never before done a launch where I was in a room by myself, which is where I ended up. We were distributed because of COVID and I’ve never experienced anything like that. It was very interesting sitting by myself, listening to the countdown, and interacting with the team. I sometimes thought the room should have been padded because of the intensity of the situation. That’s how we interacted. We were virtual and it worked, but none of those normal queues that you usually get with a countdown, you’re nodding at each other, having little sidebar discussions, none of that. It was all business.

CS: Virtual high fives… gentlemen, what advice do you have for entrepreneurs in the space industry?

RB (laughing): Good luck! Dream big and if you come up with an extraordinary idea, there will be people like myself or Dan who will most likely help turn it into reality. There’s so many extraordinary breakthroughs taking place these days and we’re looking to the next one and our doors are open.

DH: I would just say lock on to that dream, that purpose, know that it’s going to take time and you’re going to have great success and you’re going to have failures along the way and be ready for them. Use both success and failures as lessons to propel you forward.

RB: You’ll be young when you start and you’ll be old when you finish (laughing).

CS: Sir Richard, you’ve always said your dreams don’t scare you, they’re too small. And you’ve got a big event coming up with Virgin Galactic this week. What’s next for Virgin Galactic?

RB: Well, we have another milestone hopefully in Virgin Galactic’s history on Valentine’s Day. I’m delighted to say we’ve managed to get a thousand messages, love messages, from people who have been following Galactic on board and I just got the message that they managed to pack a thousand in and we’ll be on the edge of the seat watching this test flight go up — I mean, every test flight is there to try and see if it takes everything up and then we’ll have one more test flight for this and then I’m ready, fit and healthy and got my passport and waiting, waiting to go up.

CS: Sir Richard and Dan Hart, thanks so much for everything you do. And with that, thank you your participating in this year’s SmallSat Symposium.

Addvalue Technologies Ltd announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Addvalue Innovation Pte Ltd (“Addvalue”), has entered into a memorandum of understanding (“MOU”) with Dragonfly Aerospace (“Dragonfly”), a leading South African-based space engineering cum space mission company, for a joint marketing collaboration in cross promoting Dragonfly’s imaging payloads and satellites and Addvalue’s Inter-Satellite Data Relay Service (“IDRS”) (the “Business Collaboration”).

Dragonfly’s experience and heritage in the space arena, started its business first with Earth observation satellite missions in 1980s before progressing to satellite launch in 2018 and subsequently to imager launch in 2020. It aims to ride on the Business Collaboration to tackle two high priority challenges of Earth observation, namely, the quality of the images and the latency of imaging between LEO satellites and satellite operators.

Pursuant to the MOU, Addvalue and Dragonfly, tapping on each other local knowledge and clients’ networks, will collaborate to cross promote and market the following services and products of each other globally:

Dragonfly’s Earth observation solutions with a particular focus on the supply of high-resolution cameras; and Addvalue/s IDRS terminals and services.

Mr. Bryan Dean, CEO Dragonfly, remarked that, “Dragonfly and Addvalue will primarily focus on companies from the Earth observation industries to access data of high quality and precision for agricultural and environmental analysis. Dragonfly intends to continuously drive innovation through our Earth observation solutions with the goal to provide our clients with daily access to high quality imageries of anywhere in the world.”

“The MOU with Addvalue is an important milestone in the acceleration of our plans for near real-time tasking and data delivery as these are services of particular importance for our sub-meter imaging systems,” added Mr Dean.

Dr. Colin Chan, CEO of Addvalue, commented that, “Riding on the recent successful commissioning of our IDRS service in space, this Business Collaboration is part of our ongoing strategy to accelerate the worldwide expansion of our marketing outreach for our IDRS-related business. The partnership with Dragonfly will give us the added impetus to focus on high precision Earth observation missions and applications.”

Analytical Space, Inc. (ASI) has been awarded a $26.4 million, three-year contract by the Department of the Air Force’s commercial investment arm (AF Ventures), with joint funding from the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), as part of the Strategic Financing (STRATFI) program.

The award – which will be matched by private investment funds – will result in the research, development, launch, and deployment of six satellites and two additional hosted payload network nodes for Analytical Space’s Fast Pixel Network.

The Fast Pixel Network is a data transport network in LEO that ingests data from geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) collection satellites, routes that ingested data from node to node via high speed optical intersatellite links and delivers that data in real time to military operators, intelligence analysts, and commercial consumers of satellite data. Operating in the space between those GEOINT satellites and existing ground station networks, the Fast Pixel Network layer enables critical space-derived intelligence to reach end users with very low latency across diverse data pathways – orders of magnitude faster than existing space networking architectures.

“The Analytical Space team is thrilled to bring this cutting-edge capability to bear for the United States Space Force and its partner services and agencies,” said Gil Valdes, the Business Development Lead for Government Programs at Analytical Space. “As the space domain becomes more contested over the coming decades, maintaining connectivity with space-based assets and the data they produce will be absolutely critical. Analytical Space is proud to play a key role in ensuring that future for the United States and its allies.”

ASI’s Chief Executive Officer, Dan Nevius, reflected on the award of this $26.4 million STRATFI contract to ASI. “Just four years ago, Analytical Space embarked on its mission to enhance the world’s ability to access satellite data and today we stand on the precipice of building this future we envisioned for the world. Satellite data is such a key enabler in our ability to fight climate change, prevent humanitarian injustices, and decipher complex economic problems. Today’s joint investment by AF Ventures in our technology sends a clear signal that Analytical Space’s dual use technology is poised to be a premier enabler in this fight to build a peaceful world by democratizing and speeding access to space-borne data through the Fast Pixel Network.”

“The U.S. Space Force Space and Missile Systems Center is committed to leveraging a resilient and secure commercial space communications architecture to augment our exquisite systems and deliver increased capabilities for warfighters in all domains,” said 1st Lt. Tyler Albright, from SMC’s Cross Mission Ground and Communications Enterprise at Los Angeles Air Force Base, CA. “We are eager to incorporate the services provided by ASI’s STRATFI-deployed Fast Pixel Network nodes into the Department of the Air Force’s capability matrix.”

Analytical Space is deploying the Fast Pixel Network– a network of data relay satellites in low Earth orbit that will enable high throughput, low latency, path diverse downlink of data from remote sensing satellites. Today, no network exists to connect commercial and government GEOINT collection platforms in LEO through one network for delivery to end users on the ground. ASI aims to build out that infrastructure. Through its network, ASI will enable satellite operators to deliver more data faster to end users in near real time, without altering their existing communications hardware. Analytical Space has deployed two technology demonstration satellites to date and is slated to launch its third data relay demonstration satellite – Cornicen-1 – via a separate SBIR Phase II contract with the U.S. Space Force in late-2021. By closing the connectivity gaps in orbit, ASI’s network will unlock new possibilities for innovation in space, enable insights to optimize the global economy, and help us understand our planet like never before. Learn more at analyticalspace.com and via this video.

Seems like every time a SmallSat Symposium attendee turns around, identical verbiage is heard from most of the subject-matter experts regarding the smallsat market segments — “Exciting.” The same holds true for Rajesh Suseelan the Senior Director of Strategic Business Development at ST Engineering iDirect. He acknowledges there is a lot of competition in this area, but that’s what is driving technological innovations.

Connecting “things” to the internet, real-time monitoring, all actions that enabler users to act on the information immediately, that’s IoT, he said. He noted that IoT is impacting the bottom line for the end-user. Key use cases are especially relevant to satIoT where proactive monitoring of conditions is needed. Such uses range from transportation and logistics to the real-time tracking of assets, environmental monitoring for air and water quality, smart energy, mining, construction and location tracking, agriculture, cattle tracking, farm automation and maritime monitoring for buoys and vessels and fishing reports and so on.

Process and productivity improvements are among the biggest benefits that are derived from monitoring. With terrestrial-based IoT, however, there certainly are challenges, such as a lack of regional connectivity. It’s also unreliable — and what happens if something needs to be monitored and there is no power with which to accomplish that task? Deployment can also be difficult and sending someone out to correct a problem or make system changes is not always easy to accomplish.

This is where satIoT is a boon to users. In spite of cost being a factor currently, with the build up of IoT constellations, that may well be a concern relegated to the past. Mr. Suseelan did warn that not all IoT services are identical. The satIoT service should be examined for connection availability, data aggregation and delivery speed as well as reliability.

SatIoT is certainly coming into its own across a broad range of services and 2021 should witness a huge increase in its acceptance across the globe.

The 2020 Satellite Industry Association state of the satellite industry report estimates that the ground equipment market is approaching the $130 billion mark of the overall $271 billion in global revenues. Providers of ground equipment and services compete on breadth and quality of service. Ground systems for smallsats need fully integrated systems that are fully motorized and capable of auto-acquisition. These systems need to deal with a variety of orbits from LEO through GEO.

During this symposium, it is truly amazing to hear and see what is being built. Greg Quiggle of Kratos noted that 10 years ago, optimal placement of antennas was the norm and, nowadays, its access to the cloud. Mr. Quiggle mentioned that Kratos makes ground services infrastructure and the hardware and processing gear.

Ground Systems as a Service (GSaaS) is a huge trend for his company and is typically used with Occasional Use (OU) networks. An antenna is shared with other users, the spectrum is digitized at the base of the antenna, then spun up to the cloud, processed, and the data is downloaded for monetization. He said ground systems have worked their way into the cloud architecture, offering shared antennas and so on. He recognizes that ground segment pricing is rising and that’s a problem for the industry.

On the imaging side, however, there has been a notable drop in ground segment costs, y-o-y. Many customers have been asking for their networks to be handled far more dynamically. The payload should be able to be reconfigured multiple times per day, if necessary. Customers are asking to leverage the elastic nature of the cloud.

He then dove into 3GPP and how this global initiative is all about leveraging non-terrestrial air interfaces. He believes in getting space to work as an access network within the 3GPP core network. “Why can’t space be liked cell phone nets?” he asked. He said that 3GPP is a huge working group that is releasing standards all should contemplate. “The door is open for space to participate in those standards, making space another air access net.”

Also, he mentioned that ground networks have advanced over the past 10 years and there more antennas, more placements and more connectivity available. An additional thought was that optical comms will be a game changer and optical solutions will provide additional benefits. On a final note, Mr. Quiggle mentioned that Kratos already has a virtual, digital X-86 based satellite mode that is able to process hundreds of mega symbols.

Moderator Steve Kaufman of Hogan Lovells queried the panelists about the difference between providing ground systems and Ground Systems as a Service (GSaaS)… what are most of the customers/buyers doing in that regard and where is the market growth coming from? He also wanted to know if the panelists were actually competitors.

Dan Adams of Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) believes the market is predominately GSaaS and there are nuances about what that means to different customers. Communications from spacecraft to the ground to ops centers with data, that’s provided as a service. Customers don’t have to own their own antennas or ground services — there are no dedicated assets by the client company. If you are trying to be all things to all people, it all boils down to making your service totally accessible to the customer — it needs to be productized and made easily available. His company took many of they tools they use behind the scenes so that the services they offer are transparent to the customer. All of the complexities were removed and the firm is working on the next, iterative step to ensure customer flexibility and service reliability. He considered the “functionality versus cost” issue and remarked that the final answer depends on the customer. He said cost is sometimes not an issue, especially when you have the capacity and discovery combination. He said that intersatellite links are the future, but that will not eliminate the need for ground stations.

Shayn Hawthorne of Amazon Web Services doesn’t really view anyone on the panel or in the space community as competitors. They are “fellow travelers.” He explained that more than 100 of the payloads on the recent SpaceX Transporter-1 launch are AWS users. Mr. Hawthorne noted the company is not seeing clumping or a division of competitors and that customers are starting to work together — much more collaboration and integration of people’s data is occurring. He believes success comes when these actions are made fast and become low cost so that all becomes ubiquitous.

Also, price creep may be seen working its way into LEO and there is a definite need for more ground stations to be built. The tendency is toward vertical integration in the market. Cloud services allow a company to put their money into the satellite and operations and use someone else’s resources for data analysis. He recommends money be spent on the projects and leave the infrastructure stuff to the people on this panel.

The main thing he’s hearing is customers definitely being want to be able to work with the government in classified regions. AWS manages that for a lot of customers, especially imagery providers who need to get their data into secret and top secret regions. AWS gets to those regions and processes the data. He believes data should be processed in real time at the antenna and possess low latency.

Plus, customers want to be able to talk to their spacecraft more often everyday. “SDN is really what’s coming,” he said. “You have to have flexibility, agility, and have a Software Defined Network (SDN) that changes to meet customers’ needs — that’s the key. One challenge we all should focus on is that there’s a lot of new SDN’s coming and we should be applying that technology to every satellite in the world — dirt cheap apertures, multiple beams from multiple satellites to a single point — instead of thinking about owning their own ground station. Customers in space deserve that level of seamless connectivity. There’s incredible change in how people are actually ‘doing space.’” He added, “I can see a future with SDN — compute and networking will occur directly at the antenna. Ground station antennas will be connected to LEO and integration of all services and technology will occur. Ground stations can, and should, all converge.”

As far as optical communications are concerned, he indicated that will be a great technology “when we get to point where customers are ready to use that tech. Right now, to become a game changer, optical teams need to work with the cloud team for a kind of convergence, such as occurred within the RF world.”

Mr. Hawthorne completed his thoughts by noting that everyone should be designing their systems to work with intersatellite links.

Consultant Rob Call believes partnerships in the interest of the customer are productive for them and the industry; however, more standards are needed. The trend is toward GSaaS, especially with government users. Government customers are actually making a big change and heading into commercial services.

Low latency is being demanded by customers, and other services are optional, and he said get the processing on the ground. An organization has to look at performance as a huge issue that must be addressed as quickly as possible. He did note that other aspects of space have advanced more rapidly than ground networks. There are greater advances in virtualization and moving to 5G. He noted that some companies adopt more terrestrial standards and then use them for space activities.

“With managed service, we see lots more unification,” said Rajeev Gopal of Hughes Network Systems. His firm works on GEO satellites and gateways for their constellations. His mantra is Observation, Communication and Broadcast, as far as ground systems are concerned.

Concerning audience size and the scale of networks that are supporting satellites, a question was posed by the moderator wanting to know if there was a natural limit to the networks. Mr. Gopal said it used to be around 10 to 50K users at the start but now is around 100K or more on the same satellite. LEO constellations are now being designed for millions of terminals and it is no longer tens or hundreds, but millions.

Sam Peterson of Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) agrees that the trend in recent years has been toward GSaaS. There are some models where firms want to own their own infrastructure as they already have a network in place and own land and are already located all over the world — all they wish to do is put their infrastructure on your site. He sees trends regarding functionality versus costs — smallsat firms typically want a low frills, low cost network.

There are new capabilities coming online, such as optical communications and mission profiles require better performing systems and better SLAs. Networks are being increased to handle more data. Additionally, ground tracking for the increasing number of manned space systems require more and more demand of ground stations.

Regarding networks size and the number of users, Mr. Peterson said that depends on the operator. LEO apps can store a lot more data onboard these days and that data can be dumped during the smallsats’ one or two passes over a ground station per day. With different concepts of operations, a company may not need a distributed network, as it would be more cost effective to go and get a service for when and where the firm needs such support.

General Crosier was responsible for aerospace and satellite services with the USAF and, during his after 33 years of putting satellites into orbit, space planning and budgeting, he was also involved in the standup of the US Space Force (USSF), the first new arm of the military in 72 years. He joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the Director, Aerospace and Satellite Solutions

The General said, “It is exciting to see how the space industry is growing. I have become a true believe in what the cloud can do — Amazon saw and continues to see the incredible potential for the space industry. AWS noted the rapidly changing space environment, the amount of global investment and the new companies coming online. AWS determined the best way to support this industry was to build a team that possessed deep space experience to help companies overcome their greatest challenges in the cloud.”

Combined, he said, the AWS team has more than 440 years of experience in the space industry. “How can cloud computing help? The number of satellites on orbit will quintuple, 5x, across LEO, MEO and GEO. Looking at the sheer number of satellites, and with collision avoidance alone, there are enormous challenges in processing all of that data. With the cloud, a company can spin up all of this ephemeral analysis and they only pay for the minutes they consume. They won’t have to pay for that infrastructure all by themselves.”

He remarked that digital design is going to become more and more important. He noted that the USSF recently announced their intention to leverage that technology for satellite design, satellite testing as well as space modeling and simulation. “This kind of work can only be done successfully at scale and at a cost that’s affordable on the cloud using functions such as high performance compute time that is tailored specifically for those space related workloads, which the AWS teams can accomplish.” He added, “One of our customers, Boom Supersonic, is using the cloud to design a new, supersonic passenger transport. They have already consumed more than 53 million hours of compute time on AWS. That company has told AWS that it has been far cheaper and far faster with the cloud than they could have built on their own.”

General Crosier offered that instead of investing millions of dollars in limited capital into computer infrastructure, a smallsat company or other small space startup can, instead, put that money directly into a payload and payload operations which is, after all, what customers really care about… data, and the insights from that data.

“As satellites become more and more capable, and we have more and more of them in orbit, we will be bringing down — literally — tens and hundreds of petabytes of space data, he said. “That extraordinary volume of data can only be processed in the cloud. No single company could build, operate and sustain the massive data storage, analysis and processing capability necessary to handle a workload like that on their own… unless they are willing to spend billions of dollars on a global, industry-leading infrastructure, which AWS has already done. Why would anyone do that when you can pay a fraction of the cost by moving that workload into the cloud and then put that capital back into your satellite capabilities to exploit the data your customers want and your customers need.”

He then brought to the attendees’ attention AWS Ground Station, which is a fully managed service that allows users to control SATCOM, process their satellite data, scale their operations, all without having to worry about building or managing their own ground station infrastructure. “We have seen companies save between 60 and 80 percent of ground station infrastructure costs by using the AWS Ground Station. As a mater of fact, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is one of our AWS Ground Station customers.”

“The Transporter-1 mission of a week or so ago, well, of the 143 satellites aboard that we launched into space, 115 of those satellites are operated by AWS customers around the globe, either using AWS Ground Station or AWS cloud tools, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Language (AI/ML), advanced analytics, data storage, distributed networking, high performance compute or dozens of other advanced cloud capabilities.

There can be no doubt that AWS is moving aggressively into the space sector.

Just 16 days after its launch Space-SI, the Slovenian Centre of Excellence for Space Sciences and Technologies, released the first multispectral image captured by its NEMO-HD Earth observation microsatellite. Built by Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) in collaboration with SPACE-SI, NEMO-HD is Slovenia’s first microsatellite carrying a multispectral high-definition Earth observation instrument.

“SFL congratulates Slovenia on this auspicious first step toward building a robust national space program,” said SFL Director, Dr. Robert E. Zee. “NEMO-HD represents a breakthrough in next-generation, compact microsatellite missions, and pushes the envelope of what can be accomplished by a small microsatellite in Earth observation.”“NEMO-HD is enabling a new Earth observation concept by combining multispectral and video imaging from space. This can be controlled interactively in real-time if needed when NEMO-HD is flying in the range of a ground station,” said Prof. Tomaž Rodič, CEO of SPACE- SI.  “With NEMO-HD successfully in orbit, we have achieved a very innovative and cost-effective remote sensing system which combines the agile microsatellite with our transportable ground station system, STREAM, and the advanced EO data processing chain, STORM.”

The Slovenia satellite was built on SFL’s NAUTILUS microsatellite bus, which is an augmentation of SFL’s NEMO bus that has been used for numerous successful microspace missions. With a mass of only 65 kg and dimensions of 60x60x30 centimeters, NEMO-HD captures multispectral (RGB/NIR) images that can be sharpened by a panchromatic channel to 2.8-meter resolution.

The satellite also collects high-definition video at 25 frames per second. The main instrument can be operated in real-time imaging mode, allowing an operator at mission control on the ground to view the video feed as it is captured. If an event or feature of interest is spotted, a command can be sent to the satellite to collect a still image of the area.

Imagery and video data acquired by NEMO-HD will be used to monitor agriculture, forestry, urban development, and marine transport, according to Space-SI. NEMO-HD acquired its first historic multispectral image over Eastern Slovenia on September 18, 2020.

“SFL’s ability to develop compact spacecraft with space-proven attitude control and precise pointing technologies at relatively low cost was a major factor in delivering a successful NEMO-HD satellite,” said Zee. “These are critical technical requirements for successful collection of high-quality Earth observation data with microspace platforms.”

SFL is a unique microspace provider that offers a complete suite of nano-, micro- and small satellites – including high-performance, low-cost CubeSats — that satisfy the needs of a broad range of mission types from 3 to 500 kilograms. Dating from 1998, SFL’s heritage of on-orbit successes includes 65 distinct missions related to Earth observation, atmospheric monitoring, ship tracking, communication, radio frequency (RF) geolocation, technology demonstration, space astronomy, solar physics, space plasma, and other scientific research.

In its 23-year history, SFL has developed CubeSats, nanosatellites, and microsatellites that have achieved more than 135 cumulative years of operation in orbit. These microspace missions have included SFL’s trusted attitude control and, in some cases, formation-flying capabilities. Other core SFL-developed components include modular (scalable) power systems, onboard radios, flight computers, and control software.